Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim

Love at a Distance
- The Chaos of Global Relationships

Ulrich Beck

Ulrich Beck, born in 1944, is Professor of Sociology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and since 2013 the Principal Investigator of the ERC project: »Methodological Cosmopolitanism – In the Laboratory of Climate Change«.
Since 1997 he is the British Journal of Sociology Visiting Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and since 2011 he is also Professor at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris.

New forms of intimacy, love and family form the centre of this new book by Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Ulrich Beck.

About

Family and love in the times of globalisation: The grandparents in Thessaloniki and their grandchildren in Cambridge speak to each other every night – via Skype. A woman in the US woman and her Swiss husband are annoyed with their high telephone bills and travel expenses. A married couple in Europe fulfil their desire to have children with thehelp of an Indian surrogate mother.

The authors of the bestselling book Das ganz normale Chaos der Liebe (The everyday chaos of love) investigate all types of long-distance relationships in their new positive and argumentative bookfrommarriagesthat connect continents and cultures to relationships supported by skype, chat room tragedies, globalised maids, prostitutes from Sri Lanka, Indian surrogate mothers, Ethiopian work migrants – and much more. Their most important finding: Families are no longer territorial but global. World society has found its way into »normal« relationships and »normal« families; it causes disturbances, confusion, surprise, desire, happiness, breakdowns and hatred. Because in the endwe live in a world in which our loved ones are far away, while those close to us are the most remote.

Despite laying out the problems of Love at a Distance, the authors have a rather optimistic perspective onthe currentand future chaos of globalized relationships between individuals and their. They wonder if it is possible »that those things at which globalization has failed in the world at large, have, in fact, sometimes worked out in these new types of family relationshipsthe art of an in-between space, the art of living together with and beyond boundaries«